Sockatume writes: Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced "intelligent" internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring "sex". Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities.

Hamsterdan writes: Right on schedule, OCZ Technology is receiving an injection straight to the heart via Toshiba. After falling into bankruptcy last year and nearly instantly being rescued by Toshiba, the latter has announced today that it has "finalized the purchase of substantially all assets of OCZ Technology Group, making it a wholly owned subsidiary and Toshiba Group Company." Effective immediately, the Group company will operate independently as OCZ Storage Solutions, which means that we'll yet again see OCZ storage products making the rounds and breaking benchmark records.

jjp9999 writes: Weibo, China's replacement for Twitter and Facebook, went offline for about two hours on Jan. 20, when a DNS attack switched its IP address to overseas VPN software used to circumvent censorship. On Jan. 21, the brief IP switch was the most discussed topic on Weibo, with one user, ITHome, saying posting “What IP is 65.49.2.178? It’s sure to go down in history.” The IP address is one of those used by Freegate, which is free software released by Chinese dissidents in the U.S. intended to help Chinese people break through the Great Firewall. However, Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes Freegate, said he and his team of volunteers thought their networks were under attack when they got a surge of traffic with about 100,000 users a second hitting their IP address. Xia said they are still trying to analyze the incident, but he assumes it was a slip-up the Chinese authorities in charge of censoring content. “Our guess is they messed up again,” he said. “This doesn’t make sense for them, so I assume it was a mistake in their operation.”

sfcrazy writes: Valve Software has published beta ISO image which can be used to install the Debian based operating system on non-UEFI systems [download image]. When Valve announced SteamOS, quite a lot of users were disappointed as the OS images were available only for UEFI systems leaving out those users who had legacy BIOS based systems. Since the images are at beta stage and developers admit that very little testing was done on those images so it’s not recommended for dual booting systems. At the same time beware of testing it on a machine which has critical data on it as you might lose that data, so I heavily recommend to try it on a test machine and disconnect additional hard drives which may had important data on them.

alphadogg writes: Two-year-old startup Wickr is offering a reward of up to $100,000 to anyone who can find a serious vulnerability in its mobile encrypted messaging application, which is designed to thwart spying by hackers and governments. The reward puts the small company in the same league as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, all of which offer substantial payouts to security researchers for finding dangerous bugs that could compromise their users' data. Wickr has already closely vetted its application so the challenge could be tough. Veracode, an application security testing company, and Stroz Friedberg, a computer forensics firm, have reviewed the software, in addition to independent security researchers.

jonyami writes: At this year's CES in Las Vegas, Valve unveiled the first wave of Steam Machines, but if you went out and got yourself one tomorrow, what could you actually play on it? Red Bull Gaming takes a fresh look at ten of the best games currently available.

jones_supa writes: Microsoft's lead independent director John Thompson, who is heading the search for the new CEO, wrote in a December blog post that the board plans to complete the process in the 'early part of 2014.' The board now is also considering Ericsson AB Chief Executive Officer Hans Vestberg as a potential successor to departing leader Steve Ballmer, according to people briefed on the search. Vestberg joined Ericsson in 1988 and served as the company’s chief financial officer from 2007 to 2009 before becoming CEO in January 2010. He has held management positions at Ericsson in China, Brazil, Mexico and the U.S., the company said on its website. Ericsson's shares and revenue have improved markedly under the lead of Vestberg. Microsoft's CEO search has been dogged with difficulty. Any new CEO enters a stressful position as he or she will have to turn around Microsoft, whose main software business is struggling.

Qedward writes: Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015.

Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically.

Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods.

The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: ABC News reports that General Mills has ended the use of genetically modified ingredients in Cheerios, its flagship breakfast food and has been manufacturing its original-flavor Cheerios without GMOs for the past several weeks in response to consumer demand. Original Cheerios will now be labeled as "Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients," although that it is not an official certification. "We were able to do this with original Cheerios because the main ingredients are oats," says Mike Siemienas, noting that there are no genetically modified oats. The company is primarily switching the cornstarch and sugar to make the original Cheerios free of GMOs. Green America has been targeting Cheerios for the past year to raise the profile of the anti-GMO movement. "This is a big deal," says Green America's Todd Larsen. "Cheerios is an iconic brand and one of the leading breakfast cereals in the US. We don't know of any other example of such a major brand of packaged food, eaten by so many Americans, going from being GMO to non-GMO." For its part General Mills says that it was never about pressure. "It’s not about safety. Biotech seeds, also known as genetically modified seeds, have been approved by global food safety agencies and widely used by farmers in global food crops for almost 20 years," writes GM Spokesman Tom Forsythe. "Cheerios isn’t changing. It’s still the One and Only."

Koen Lefever writes: Over 250 Academics Against Mass Surveillance demand American and European security agencies to stop large scale monitoring of the population: "The signatories of this declaration call upon nation states to take action. Intelligence agencies must be subjected to transparency and accountability. People must be free from blanket mass surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies from their own or foreign countries. States must effectively protect everyone's fundamental rights and freedoms, and particularly everyone's privacy. "

DavidGilbert99 writes: CryptoLocker was a worrying enough piece of malware when it was a simple Trojan horse, but it has evolved into a worm, and can now easily spread under its own steam via removable drives. It means the figure of 250,000 infected PCs could soon skyrocket. Researchers believe that the differences in the new variant, discovered by Trend Micro, could mean it is the work of a copycat gang of cyber criminals and not the creators of CryptoLocker.

An anonymous reader writes: "Some of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail concerns inside the NSA about drowning in information. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the agency said the efforts were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store" data.

"In March 2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection," another document shows.

"In response to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the agency is "not collecting everything, but we do need the tools to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies."

Some of this may be behind a paywall, but if approached via EU papers WSJ sometimes allows access to "World News" articles w/o subscription